Required Tipping?
Interesting article on WZZM13.com tonight out of Winston-Salem, NC. It brings up the question about what exactly the tip is.
A North Carolina woman has started a petition against her favorite Japanese restaurant.
She’s upset because the restaurant put a tip on her bill without her consent. The restaurant says they’re just trying to deal with a habitually-bad tipper.
Of course, there’s a lot more to this story. The restaurant says they told her they were going to do it and she said it was ok with it, but my question is, is it really ok to require a tip? Isn’t a tip supposed to be a reflection on service?
Now, before you lay into me, my mom is a waitress and makes more money waitressing three nights a week than she does from her 9 to 5 job. I would never dream of walking away from a table without tipping. While I think people that do are pretty awful people, I don’t feel a restaurant should add a tip on to the bill….even for big parties. At that point, you’re not tipping based on your experience, you’re just being charged more for the food.
Opinions?
SW Michigan Dining 
Bad service, bad tip…I’ve done it before when the waitstaff was just so uber-shitty and totally unreceptive to my repeated requests (e.g., clean utensils, napkins, water refills), but I also told the waiter/waitress WHY I wasn’t leaving them a tip so they wouldn’t repeat their abhorrent service…
There was a story a few months ago about this very topic where the patrons were arrested for failing to leave a tip…My hometown no less…http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local-beat/Time-In-Prison–70426052.html?yhp=1
If waitstaff actually made a regular $ per hour like the rest of the working world, tipping would only be at the discretion of the diners. Most servers make less than $3-4 per hour and rely heavily on tips just to survive. Their profession was allowed to be discriminated against (financially) when some legislators discovered that a few servers in the Washington DC area were making in excess of 50K-100K/year. Apparently they didn’t like the idea of people without college educations making more money than many college graduates. So an entire industry was punished because of the good fortune of a handful of people.